Eva Hesse was born to a German Jewish family in the city of Hamburg. In 1938, in order to escape the Nazis, two-year-old Hesse was sent by her parents to the Netherlands on the Kindertransport; they were reunited in England six months later before immigrating to Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where Hesse spent her young adult life. In a career that lasted only a decade before her early death, Hesse redefined contemporary sculpture by experimenting with unconventional materials to create a vocabulary of organic forms that are abstract, but also visceral.